Chinese Sausage (臘腸)

So I finally got my hands on some Chinese sausage (臘腸, lop chung as we call it in Cantonese. I’m not going to go into the romanization variations). I bought it via Great Wall Supermarket at Gallows road. Lets just say that while the Chinese-ness was comforting, I like judgmental Koreans better than judgmental Chinese. At least the Korean marts have some Chinese stuff–the Chinese mart was all Chinese. Chinese signs, Chinese foods, Chinese labels — no regard for English translation here. I didn’t know the names, let alone the ingredients, of things I was looking at. I had to rely on my dusty dusty 漢字 character reading skills to get me to the right area. I also had made the mistake of visiting on a weekend. The place was packed, not to mention smelly and dirty, and not in a nice, comforting, homely way (I’m blanking on relevant examples here…). I also was looked at in a “what the heck–white girl. you’re lost” way every second I was in there. Never thought I’d want to go back to Grand Mart, Super/Non-Super H, or Lotte, but it’s true.

I thought there’d be three or four kinds of sausage there, but the whole top row of the refrigerated meats section was sausage. Lets just say… overwhelmed. I bought the kind that actually had some semblance of English on it, and I think I chose wrong. The only kind I’ve ever had was a mixture of Chinese/Portuguese sausage, and we got it from the local butcher on Maui. Let’s just say I’ll never eat this again, never go here again, and I’m never venturing in the Chinese sausage realm again without my dad or other relatives from his side of the family.

Originally, I wanted to make a Chinese sausage breakfast rice patty type meal with furikake’d rice, some sausages on top and a sunny-side up egg (or in my case, over-easy). But, I researched cooking the sausage online and people recommended cooking the sausage in the rice cooker at the same time as the rice. this resulted in both undercooked rice and sausage (or maybe just weird looking) that were then re-cooked and re-cooked again. The sausage was kinda grey-ish and I then decided to take the casing off (the casing wasn’t even cut on some of them!), cut into slices and stir-fry to try and salvage this. I knew it wasn’t going to taste good — it smelled off. I don’t know why, but it did.

I mixed the sausage slices, some onion, enoki mushrooms, napa, flax seed, and spices (rooster sauce, soy sauce, pepper, sugar), but there was no hope. I added some dried shrimp furikake to the rice, but not too much because the furikake was a tad old and let’s just say…’ripe’ (I tossed it out after this). The rice tasted okay, but I’m the type of person that likes plain rice. The sausage… I ate a few pieces but it got to a point where I started chewing one and then I just spit it out. After that, I was done. I made a bowl of cereal and called it a night.